Page 19

FIFTEEN

I throw the flattened tulip into the large trash bin outside the train station, among rancid food wrappers and coffee cups—a place I’m certain no one will try to unearth it.

I purchase my ticket from the tired-looking woman at the window, who tells me that the train is a half hour delayed due to the storm. But I don’t care, I’ll wait as long as it takes. I sit on one of the benches outside, beneath the awning, puddles at my feet. I’m still wearing Oak’s sweatshirt, the one he put over my shoulders when he saved me from the storm. I want to throw it away too, leave it behind—it smells like him, like heartache—but it’s the only dry thing I have. So I zip it up and promise myself that I’ll burn it when I reach my new home. Other passengers stand around me with looks of desperation in their eyes, waiting for the evening train to arrive.

Oak’s truck is gone. And my heart is in pieces.

Archer and I believed we had collected all the stolen tulips—we thought we’d set everything right. But we were wrong. One remained in the hands of the last person I thought possessed one. The person I needed, the person I could never shake from my thoughts.

And now I know why.

My mind carries me back to every moment I spent with him, trying to unravel the way he made me feel, looking for the truth. But the deeper I go, the more I understand: It was only because of the tulip. It was the reason I couldn’t shake him from my thoughts.

The reason I stayed in Cutwater longer than I should have.

Our summer together was a riddle that had only one answer: a tulip he saved inside a book.

The drizzling rain has begun to let up, the sky cracking apart to reveal a ceiling of stars.

I thought Oak would be the one to alter the course of my life. But I broke myself against the fortress of his heart again and again. Overcome by a madness that was so terrible, so beautiful, I might be foolish enough to do it all over again.

I cannot be trusted.

Someone laughs, the sound echoing through the dark, and I lift my eyes to see a group of shadows striding down the road in front of the station. As they step into the overhead lamplight, I see Dale Dawson and Chloe Perez. They’re making their way toward town, and Chloe sways a little like she might be drunk. Maybe they’re on their way to someone’s house or meandering home after the storm. But I see someone else trailing behind: Jude.

The paper chatterbox moves swiftly in his hands as he walks, giving a fortune to a girl who I think is Lulu Yen—it’s hard to tell as they move in and out of the shadows. He peels back a paper corner and reads the words to Lulu. She laughs, throwing her head back, the stud in her nose glinting against the light from the streetlamp, then she hands Jude something small I can’t see—payment for the fortune—before jogging to catch up to Chloe, her eyes shimmering from the secret fortune only she knows.

I haven’t seen Jude since the day at the drive-in, when he touched my palm and told me: “Tears and rain… it’s all the same. Forsaken Creek is the only way to leave.”

I draw in a breath, understanding now—he was right.

Earlier tonight I cried, slumped over in the garden, and my tears bled in with the rain, flooding the banks of Forsaken Creek. Maybe this is only the story I want to believe: where fate has known all along how this tale would end. Maybe it was only a storm, maybe the rain filled the swamp, and it finally took away the house that’s been threatening to collapse for decades.

Or maybe… the Goodes really are witches, sorcerers, conjurors of ill magic. Maybe I am descended from those who carried alchemy across the Atlantic, hidden in our cells. Maybe there is enchantment in Forsaken Creek. Maybe Fern Goode cast a spell into the tulip bulbs that made us weavers of fate, of destiny. Maybe I had the power to destroy the garden all along. I just didn’t believe it.

Whatever the cause, Jude saw what would happen.

The future he told me that day came true.

But he also told me something else. He pointed to my heart and said, “This must break. This must weep, and then you will finally be free.”

This part I wish he had been wrong about.

Across the road, the group is nearly out of sight, but I stand up from the bench and cross the sidewalk. Jude looks up, seeing me—blond hair curling around his small ears, freckles along his cheekbones—and he takes a step back, startled.

“I need another fortune,” I say quickly. “I can pay you.” I need to know that my future has changed; I need to know what comes next.

Jude’s eyes flick to his friends, who have stopped walking and watch us with obvious nervousness. “I don’t take money,” he answers quickly, his eyes now looking anywhere but at me. “Only trades.”

“I’ll trade whatever you want.”

But he shakes his head, looking down at his white Converse high-tops. “I don’t want anything from you.”

He’s thinking of the tulips—the only thing of value I really have—the tulips that swept through town and broke the minds of everyone who possessed one. He wants nothing to do with them. Or me. He doesn’t know that the tulips are long gone anyway.

“Please,” I beg, stepping closer. “I need to know…” I hesitate, unsure what I really want. “I need to know that there’s something better waiting for me outside of this town. I need to know that my past won’t follow me wherever I go, that the curse is broken, that the tulips are really gone.”

Jude’s pale eyes soften, and he looks at me with a flicker of sadness. But he pushes the paper origami into the front pocket of his slacks, out of sight. “Fate is like a river…,” he breathes, cheeks hollowed. “Always pushing us toward something we can’t escape.” He tilts his chin to his shoes again, yet watches me through the length of his blond eyelashes. “Whatever fortune I give you won’t alter what’s to come. Maybe it’s better not to know. Maybe you need to stop looking for fate to show you the way. You make your own way, Lark Goode.”

He doesn’t smile, but there is a softness in his eyes, a gentleness that can’t be conveyed in words. He turns away from me before I can ask anything else.

Behind me, a bell rings, and someone yells that the ten p.m. train is now arriving. Jude and his friends have already made their way up the sidewalk, laughing, safe and buoyant, like their lives haven’t been twisted and bent by a curse since the day they were born. As if they have nothing to fear.

I board the train and settle into a seat by myself, peering out at the town I’ve only ever wanted to escape. I’m leaving behind the carcass of the girl I used to be. My home is gone. The garden destroyed. And if I’m lucky, the curse was carried away with it.

“You make your own way, Lark Goode,” Jude said.

And maybe he’s right. I’ve spent most of my life trying to run from who I am. Maybe now I need to run toward something.

The girl I’m supposed to be.

I make my own fate now.

Because I have nothing more to lose.

The train lurches into motion, clattering forward over the tracks, and I know— I know —I’ll never see this town again. Once I leave, there’s no going back.

A “summer thing.”

A thing we couldn’t trust from the start.

The train picks up speed, vibrating, a metal monster thundering through the dense evergreens, and I think of Oak, sitting in his truck when I said goodbye, the vacant look in his eyes. The hurt that rose inside me, and the pain I could see in him.

Both of us damaged.

I think of the cold water that rose beneath the floorboards of my house.

Maybe it was just a force of nature, violent enough to finally break the house free from the dirt, to upend the tulips. Or maybe it was something else.

The end of a story written long ago by Fern Goode.

My tears swelling the banks of the creek, the blood in my veins possessed by a sorcery passed from one Goode to the next. My heartache capturing the storm and thrusting it down to destroy the source of all my pain.

Whatever the cause, I’m leaving it all behind.

This is the fate I make for myself.

I want the history of the tulips, of our name, to be lost with time… and forgotten. Until no one remembers the Goodes or the madness that overtook the town one summer.

I tip my head against the window, the soft spray of rain covering the glass. I’ve spent so many nights atop the abandoned train car in the woods, dreaming of this, the sway and motion of a train carrying me, mile by mile, away from this wretched place.

This is the feeling I couldn’t name when I sat in Oak’s truck and stared at the empty land where my house and the garden once sat:

Freedom.